On the morning of October 9th, forty-one combines came over the hill at sunrise. In a line. Headlights still on. Engines so loud the ground hummed. Like an army that had decided to be kind. My coworker's son, Hiroto, was standing in the field when they came. He was sixteen. He didn't know what he was looking at. Hiroto had spent the year as an exchange student with the Lindgren family in eastern Nebraska. Corn and soybeans. Nine hundred acres. The same family had worked that ground since 1911. The first month was a comedy. Tom, the father, woke him at 5:30 to feed the cattle. Hiroto had never seen a cow up close. The cow was not impressed. He asked Tom how many kernels of corn were in the field. Tom thought about it and said, "Oh, about forty million." Hiroto stopped asking questions about corn. The farm dog, a scruffy old heeler named Biscuit, decided on the second day that Hiroto belonged to her. Nobody was consulted. And there was Cody. Tom's son. Seventeen. Quiet. Arms like fence posts. For the first two weeks, he didn't say a single word to the Japanese kid sleeping across the hall. Then one night, in the truck, they fought over the radio. Country music versus Japanese pop. It got loud. It got serious. Tom laughed so hard he had to pull over. After that, they were brothers. Nobody decided it. It just was. In July, Tom collapsed in the north field. Heart attack. He was 52. He was gone before the ambulance found the road. Grief in a farmhouse is quiet in a specific way. His boots stayed by the back door. Laced. Like they were waiting for him to come in for supper. Nobody could move them. Ellie, nine years old, started sleeping in her father's seed cap. It came down over her eyes. She wouldn't take it off. And Cody, at the funeral, said exactly one sentence. "I'll bring in the harvest." Nine hundred acres. A job for a whole crew. Tom had brought in every harvest for thirty years. He had never missed one. Not for a broken arm. Not for a blizzard. Not once. Cody was not going to be the Lindgren who missed one. So in September, he started. Alone. Up at four. In the combine before the sun. Back after midnight. Hiroto couldn't drive a combine. So he did the only thing he could. He rode in the cab next to his brother. All day. All night. He held the thermos. He talked. In bad English, about anything. Baseball. Japan. Girls. Biscuit. Anything to keep Cody's eyes open. Some nights Cody fell asleep at the wheel for a second, and Hiroto would shake his arm, and Cody would say, "I'm good, I'm good." He was not good. One night, around two in the morning, in the middle of a dark field, Cody stopped the combine. He put his forehead on the steering wheel. And he broke. All of it. Everything he hadn't let anyone see since July. Seventeen years old. Alone in the middle of nine hundred acres, in his father's machine, in the dark. Hiroto told my coworker he didn't know a single English word that could help. So he put his hand on Cody's back, and said the only word that came. In Japanese. "Niichan." Big brother. Cody didn't know what it meant. He knew exactly what it meant. They sat there until the sun came up. Two weeks later, on the morning of October 9th, Hiroto heard the sound first. He walked out of the house, still in his socks, and looked up at the hill. And they came. Forty-one combines. Grain trucks behind them. Semis behind those. Neighbors from three counties. Men who argued with each other at the co-op every Monday. Men who hadn't spoken to each other in years. Old men. Young men. The high school football team, driving grain carts. Church women unloading folding tables and coolers of sandwiches at the edge of the field. Nobody had called them. Nobody had to. Cody came out of the house and just stood there, staring. He couldn't move. An old neighbor named Arlen, eighty years old, climbed down out of the lead combine, walked across the dirt, and put his hand on Cody's shoulder. "Your daddy helped every single one of us, son. Every one." Then he pointed at Tom's combine. "Get in. You're leading." And Cody climbed into his father's combine, and pulled out in front, and led forty-one machines across his father's land. They brought in nine hundred acres in one day. At sunset, there was one row left. And without anyone saying a word, every combine stopped. They pulled off to the edge of the field. Forty-one machines in a long line, side by side, headlights on in the gold light. Two hundred people stood by the trucks. And they let Cody take the last row. Alone. With Ellie in the cab beside him, in her father's cap, pushing it up out of her eyes so she could see. When he reached the end of that last row, forty-one horns went off at once. You could hear them, people said, in the next town. Hiroto came home to Japan in June. His father asked him what the most important thing was that he'd learned in America. He expected English. Or baseball. Or maybe something about corn. Hiroto thought about it. Then he said: "In Japan, we say a family is the people under one roof. In Nebraska, I learned that family is whoever comes over the hill." Every October now, Hiroto gets a photo from Cody. Always the same picture. A line of combines coming over a hill at sunrise. Always the same three words. "They came again."

Notes like this are the best part about starting a company: Hello Brian & Dharmesh,  I joined HubSpot in March 2013 as one of the early DubSpot team and after 13 incredible years this is my last month. Many times I've heard Brian talk about building a company that your grandkids can be proud of. I am writing this email partly to give you an insight into the incredible impact you've had on my life and partly because I imagine it is difficult for your family to appreciate the impact HubSpot has had on so many like me. I hope you share this with your family.  I joined HubSpot at 26 yrs old as a Level 1 Sales Rep. I was early in my sales career, highly motivated and eager to learn. HubSpot gave me an opportunity I couldn't have imagined and I didn't fully appreciate until later. I worked hard, learnt fast and chased targets. I moved to Manager and later moved to Sales Director. In January 2014, Nisha Anand joined as a Level 1 Support Rep. We met, fell in love and got married. She also worked hard, learnt fast and chased promotions. She is now a Principal Solutions Engineer on UK Corp.  Financially HubSpot has transformed our lives but it is more than that. Our friends are HubSpotters. At our Wedding there were tables of HubSpotters. There are family and friends in Leitrim and Belfast that still cannot explain what HubSpot does but they follow it in the news, check the stock price and ask us "what's happening at the big American company?". HubSpot is part of our life story. At every step of our lives HubSpot has been there:  - We timed our Wedding so we could take our sabbaticals for our Honeymoon.  - We sold HUBS shares to buy our first home - When Covid hit we continued progressing our careers working from home - We used tuition reimbursement to up-skill and learn at Harvard, UCD and Oxford. - We used the Temporary Mobility policy to work from London for 1 month during fertility treatment. It worked and we got pregnant. - When our twins girls arrived 10 weeks early and spent a month in hospital, HubSpot supported us. I had 6 weeks for Paternity leave plus used my 2nd sabbatical to be there for my family - My wife took 12 months of maternity leave plus her 2nd sabbatical and returned to continue progressing her career and recently triggered another promotion. - We sold HUBS again to move into a bigger home. My father tells me that I have spent one third of my working career at HubSpot. It is almost impossible to explain the impact HubSpot has had on my life. What an amazing company. I hope you and your family are incredibly proud of what you have built. For the rest of my life I will be grateful to you and HubSpot. Wishing you and your family all the best in the future.

My friend Chizuru runs a nine-room inn up in the mountains north of Tokyo. Her grandmother opened it in 1961. Guests from over forty countries have slept there. I asked Chizuru which ones are different. She didn't let me finish the question. "Americans." Then she started a list. She says she's been adding to it in her head for nineteen years. "Everything is 'the best I've ever had.' The rice. The tea. The towels. A man from Idaho held up a pickle and said, 'Best pickle I've ever had.' He took another bite and said it again. Same pickle. Two bests." "In Japan, the staff folds your futon. That's our job. Americans fold it themselves. Badly. Then they leave a note. 'So sorry. We tried. It looks like a burrito.' My staff refolds the futon. They keep the notes. There's a drawer." "They walk into the kitchen. Nobody walks into the kitchen. They walk in to thank the cook. Our cook is 70. The first time, he just stood there holding a ladle. Now he comes out before dessert every night. He says it's to check the rice. It is not to check the rice." "At dinner, they ask what every dish is. I answer honestly. Sometimes the honest answer is 'fish liver.' They look at each other. Somebody whispers, 'Okay. For Japan.' And they eat it. Like it's a mission. Then they ask for seconds. To be polite. Then they eat the seconds." "The first time in the big bath, every American man moves like he's walking into a minefield. By day three, a guy from New Mexico is telling two old rice farmers about his truck. Nobody speaks the other's language. They talk for an hour. All three of them cry when he leaves." "American kids bow to everything. The staff. The dog. The vending machine. Nobody taught them. They decided Japan is a bowing country, and they committed." "A lady from Maryland learned one Japanese phrase on the plane. She learned the wrong one. Every morning at breakfast, she said 'oyasumi nasai' to my staff. Good night. Very proudly. Nobody could bring themselves to correct her. Now my staff says good night to every American at 8 a.m." "They always ask who started the inn. When I say my grandmother, they ask to meet her. Japanese guests never ask. She's 94. She does her hair every morning now. Just in case." Then Chizuru told me about April 2020. Every reservation was cancelled. Nine rooms. Zero guests. The inn had never once been empty. Not in fifty-nine years. Her grandmother still did her hair every morning. She put on her good kimono and sat by the front door. All day. Facing the gate. Chizuru asked her why. "Just in case." One night, Chizuru sat at the front desk with a calculator until she ran out of reasons to keep going. She wrote a notice for the gate. They would close in June. At 2 a.m., an email came from North Dakota. A family who had stayed two nights in 2017. Mom, dad, two little girls. The vending machine girls. "We know we can't come. We'd like to book Room 4 for two nights anyway. Please don't refund us. Just keep it warm for us." Chizuru read it to her grandmother in the morning. Her grandmother asked her to read it again. Then again. Then the old woman walked down the hall, slid open the door to Room 4, and turned on the heater. The emails kept coming. "Room for two, any dates. Whichever room is closest to the pickles." (Idaho) "We'll fold our own futons. Badly. You know us." (Vermont) "Tell the cook we still think about the fish liver. Not in a good way. Tell him thank you anyway." (Georgia) "Tell the two farmers I still have the truck." (New Mexico) "OYASUMI NASAI!!! (I know now. I KNOW. I'm never coming back to Japan out of shame. Book me two nights.)" (Maryland) By the end of May, there were thirty-one bookings like that. Most of them from America. Nobody came. Everybody paid. Chizuru still doesn't know who told who. The notice never went up. Last spring, the family from North Dakota finally came back. The girls are 16 and 18 now. In the lobby, they bowed to the vending machine. Out of respect. Chizuru's grandmother had been at the gate since 6 a.m. Hair done. Good kimono. They arrived at 3. In sixty-five years, she has learned exactly one English sentence. Americans taught it to her without knowing. She took the dad's big rough hands in her tiny ones and said it. "Best guests I ever had." The dad builds grain bins for a living. He sat down on the stone step by the gate and cried like a little boy. His daughters filmed it. The video has eleven views. Nine of them are Chizuru. The other two are the cook. America, I know you think those were small things. A second bite of a pickle. A bad futon and a note. A thank-you in a kitchen. The wrong Japanese word, said like you meant it. They kept the lights on. Every April, Room 4 is closed for two nights. Chizuru won't sell it to anyone. The heater stays on. It's your room, America. You already paid.

When my friend's daughter Rina was seventeen, she spent a year as an exchange student on a cattle ranch in West Texas. Her host father was named Hank. Hank was 56. Built like a fence post that had survived something. Hands like they'd been left out in the weather for thirty years. A white straw hat he took off only for church and supper. Hank spoke about nine words a day. On her first day, he picked her up at the airport in Lubbock. He looked at her for a long time. Then he said: "You Rina?" "Yes." "Truck." That was the whole conversation. Two hours of highway. The radio was off. The dog in the back seat was named Dog. That night, Rina locked herself in the bathroom and cried, very quietly, so no one would hear. She was sure he hated her. She was sure she'd made a terrible mistake. She counted the days to June on her phone. There were 311. His wife, Lori, found her the next morning. "Sugar, he doesn't hate you. He's just built that way. Hank talks with his hands. You'll see." She did see. Slowly. Her bike had a flat on Tuesday. On Wednesday, it was fixed. Nobody said anything. Her room was cold. A week later, there was a space heater by her bed. Nobody said anything. At dinner, she mentioned once, very quietly, that the dark out there scared her. The ranch was twenty miles from the nearest streetlight. The next night, there was a flashlight on her pillow. New batteries. The tag still on it. Nobody said anything. The silence in that house wasn't cold. It was like a barn in winter. Something warm was breathing in the dark. Then she noticed the truck. Every morning at 4:30, before the sun, before the cattle, Hank's headlights went down the long dirt road and disappeared. He was back by six. Every single day. One morning in October, she was waiting by the truck when he came out. He looked at her. She looked at him. "Get in," he said. They drove forty minutes to a nursing home in a small town. Hank walked down a hallway that smelled like bleach and coffee, into a room where an old man sat by the window. His father. The old man looked up at the giant in the doorway, a little afraid. "Morning, sir," Hank said. He filled a little bowl with warm water. He put a towel around his father's neck. And with those enormous, wrecked hands, he shaved him. Slowly. Carefully. Like he was painting something. He hummed while he did it. Some old hymn. Rina had never heard him make a sound like that. His father watched him in the mirror the whole time. When it was done, the old man touched his own smooth face, and said: "You're a nice fella. Do I know you?" Hank wiped the razor clean. "No, sir. I'm just the man who shaves you." He'd been doing it every morning for three years. His father hadn't known his name for two. On the drive home, Rina stared out the window so he wouldn't see her face. Hank didn't say anything. But he turned on the radio, very low. For the first time. In February, the phone rang at midnight. Her grandmother in Japan had died. Her grandmother had raised her while her parents worked. Walked her to school every day for six years. Had held both her hands at the airport and said, "Go see the world. I'll be right here when you come back." Rina had promised to come home in the summer. The funeral was in three days. Her parents said there was no way to get her home in time. Stay. Finish the year. Grandma would want that. So Rina did what Japanese girls are taught to do. She said she was fine. She thanked everyone. And she went to her room and didn't come out. She didn't eat. She didn't sleep. All she could think about was a funeral on the other side of the world, and an empty space in a row of people in black, where she was supposed to be standing. On the third night, at ten o'clock, there was a knock. Hank was in the doorway. Coat on. Keys in his hand. "Get your coat." She didn't ask. She was too tired to ask. They drove into the dark. Hours of it. West Texas at night is the emptiest place on earth. Sleet ticked against the windshield. Dog slept in the back. Hank didn't say a word, and for once, Rina understood that it wasn't because he had nothing to say. At three in the morning, they pulled into a quiet street in Dallas, in front of a small building with a curved roof and a single light on. A Buddhist temple. The nearest one he could find. Five hours away. He had called that afternoon. He had told the monk, an old man from Vietnam, that there was a girl at his house whose grandma had died in Japan, and she couldn't go home, and could they please, please open the door tonight. The monk was waiting on the steps in a sweater over his robes. And Rina looked at the clock in the truck, and her breath stopped. 3:00 a.m. in Dallas. Six in the evening in Japan. The exact hour her grandmother's funeral was beginning. Hank had done the math. Inside, it was warm and smelled of incense. There was a small altar and a golden Buddha and candles. The monk didn't know the Japanese way. Rina showed him. He nodded, and stepped aside. She lit the incense. She bowed. She pressed her palms together and closed her eyes. She told her grandmother she was sorry she wasn't there. She told her she'd seen the world, like she'd promised. She told her about the ranch, and Dog, and a man who said nine words a day. When she opened her eyes, Hank was beside her. He had taken off his hat. He was holding it against his chest. He was copying everything she did. Clumsily. A beat too late. The ash from his incense fell on his boot. He bowed too deep and his bad knee cracked like a branch in the quiet. He got down on that knee anyway, on the hard floor, a six-foot-four rancher in a Buddhist temple at three in the morning, praying for a Japanese grandmother he had never met, in a way he did not understand, because a seventeen-year-old girl under his roof needed someone to stand next to her. That's when Rina finally cried. Not quietly this time. All of it. Every day she'd been holding it in. Hank didn't say anything. He just put one hand on her back. A hand so big it covered her whole back, like a roof. And he left it there until she was done. The sun was coming up over the plains when they drove home. Pink, then gold. Dog woke up and put his head on her shoulder. Somewhere near Abilene, Hank spoke. It was the longest thing Rina ever heard him say. "My dad don't know me anymore. I go anyway. You don't stop showing up for people just 'cause they can't see you. Your grandma couldn't see you tonight. Don't matter. You showed up." Then he turned the radio back on, low, and didn't say another word for the rest of the day. Rina is 24 now. She lives in Tokyo. She went back to Texas twice. She stood in the back of the church at his father's funeral. She called Lori "Mom" before she even realized she was doing it. And every year, on the day her grandmother died, at three in the morning Texas time, her phone lights up. A photo. A stick of incense burning in an old coffee can on a porch rail, the sun coming up over the pasture behind it. And one message. Always the same. "Lit one for your grandma. Still showing up. Hank." Every year, she counts the words. Nine. He has never once gone over.

Back in October, I wrote about a little American girl at Tokyo Station. The crew that cleans the bullet trains formed a line on the platform and bowed to the incoming train. She stopped walking, pressed her arms to her sides, and bowed right back. Big. Serious. Very careful. Then she whispered to her mom, "They're so nice." Some of you asked if the crew remembered her. So I found out. One of the women on that crew lives in my parents' building. Mrs. Tsuruta. She's 63. Thirty-one years cleaning bullet trains. She remembered. Pink sneakers. One lace untied. The whole crew remembered. They have a name for her. Ojigi-chan. Little Miss Bow. Then Mrs. Tsuruta said something that stopped me. "That week," she said, "I had decided to quit." Her knees. Thirty-one years of kneeling between rows of seats. Seven minutes per train. Fifteen trains a shift. "Nobody looks at us," she said. "We bow to every train, and people walk past us like we're part of the platform. That's normal. That's the job. I don't complain." "I had already written the letter." "Then a little girl from America looked straight at me. Like I was somebody." She tore up the letter that night. Then she did something else. Her daughter is 35. For years, her daughter had told friends her mother "works for the railway." Never what she did there. Mrs. Tsuruta told her about the little girl. The next Saturday, her daughter came to Tokyo Station without saying anything. She stood on the platform and watched her mother bow to a train. When the doors opened and the crew went in, her daughter bowed too. To her mother's back. Mrs. Tsuruta didn't see it. A coworker told her afterward. She had to go sit in the break room for a while. I asked her if it was just that one girl. She laughed. Then she talked about Americans for an hour. "They try to help. Badly. A big man wearing a cowboy hat grabbed a seat to turn it around for us. Wrong direction. It got stuck. He apologized to the seat." "They clap. When we finish a car, sometimes the Americans waiting on the platform clap for us. In thirty-one years, no Japanese passenger has clapped for us. Not once. That's not our custom, and that's fine. But I have to be honest with you. It's very nice." "They film us like it's the Olympics. One man narrated the whole thing like a football announcer. 'And she goes for the tray table... SHE GETS IT.' The woman next to me almost dropped her bag laughing." "An American grandma hugged me. In the middle of my shift. I was holding a trash bag. She said, 'Honey, you work too hard,' and she hugged the trash bag too. By accident. She apologized to it." "A family of six tried to bow to each of us. Individually. Six of them. Twelve of us. That's seventy-two bows. The train nearly left late. In thirty-one years, no train of mine has ever come that close to leaving late. My supervisor still doesn't know why." "A boy from Texas asked for my autograph. I have never signed anything but timesheets. I signed it. My hand was shaking." "Sometimes there's a note left on a seat. In English. 'Thank you for cleaning. You guys rock.' Half of us can't read English. We keep every one. They're on the wall of our break room. The wall is almost full." There's one note in the middle of that wall that Mrs. Tsuruta won't let anyone take down. Blue ink. Written on a ticket envelope. A younger coworker translated it for her. "My dad was a janitor for 35 years. Nobody ever bowed to him. I bowed back for him today. Thank you." "I read that one," she said, "when my knees are bad." Then she told me what the crew started doing after Ojigi-chan. When a train pulls in and there's an American kid at the window, the crew bows a little lower. To the kid. Just to see. They keep a tally on the break room wall, next to the notes. Kids who bowed back so far: 143. One boy bowed so low he tipped over. They counted him twice. "And the ones who didn't?" I asked. "We stopped counting those," she said. "There weren't enough to bother." Mrs. Tsuruta was supposed to retire this March. Last week, she asked for one more year. "Somebody has to be on that platform," she said, "when the next one bows." Ojigi-chan told her mom, "They're so nice." Mrs. Tsuruta says she got that backwards. "We were just doing our job," she said. "She was the nice one." America, that little girl had no idea she was keeping a 63-year-old woman on that platform. She just thought it was polite. You do that a lot. You raise kids who look at the person cleaning up and see somebody.

Conor Coxxx says he was not even sure he was well endowed until he risked shooting adult films from Craigslist to pay his bills: ​"How did the character slash performer Conor Cox come about?" ​"It is a long story, but I guess we got time." ​"I needed money like everyone, and I was behind on bills and had to make ends meet." ​"Got on Craigslist and found a lot of adult film gigs back in the day when Craigslist was not as sketchy." ​"I thought I might have a big dick and would give it a shot." ​"You think?" ​"I wasn't sure at the time to be honest with you." ​"Before porn, I had the same girlfriend for six or seven years and we were engaged, so I had only been with one girl." ​"At that point, I found a couple producers in Atlanta, they gave me a shot, and I started shooting with them regularly." ​"They kind of brought me down to Florida, met a lot of other people, and somewhere along the way I named myself and decided to take it seriously."

Woke pretty much died 3 years ago and big Hollywood studios are STILL doing it. These are hundred million dollar investments. There is no upside to race or gender swapping Homer's Odyssey. Literally NO ONE wants a girl boss superhero movie. Meanwhile, Obsession produced 400X ROI. Christopher Nolan might be my favorite director so I took this one hard. The market signal couldn't be clearer so I assume it's just the remnants of ESG and DEI policies. Or awards show requirements. What a (Greek) tragedy. But here's the good news. The major studios must be nearing financial ruin and we SHOULD get more original story lines like obsession. Nature is healing. A year or two from now we might finally be done with these miserable woke abominations. Sorry, Foid Gayweather, I mean Elliot Page. We're not doing this "Oh so brave" shit anymore.